Quinn is not out of the woods yet. But he will be soon, I’m pretty sure. After all, he still has to deliver the line that we’ve heard so many times before in the opening credits: “Carrie, you’ll never be free.”

Dying words? Let’s hope not. It would just be too cruel, after all he’s been through, and too horrible for us, after all we’ve been through — including, this week, watching the very delightful development of a real, solid, powerful and productive friendship between Astrid and Carrie.

Don’t scoff. At least some of you, I am sure, are feeling just as inspired by the new Astrid-Carrie partnership as I am. Some of you, I recall, were ready to be offended, a number of weeks ago, by plot developments that we all suspected would turn into a clichéd and old-fashioned cat-fight over their elusively seductive mutual friend, Quinn. But the writers surprised us. The dynamic between the women changed beautifully in this episode.

Carrie has been wronged, and Astrid knows it. She’s being wronged again — belittled and sidelined while the dopey guys in charge are letting Allison run around in her gray suit and play spy again.

“You don’t buy her story do you?” Carrie asks.

“Not for one second,” Astrid replies.

And with that one shot of validation, they bond. Astrid’s vibe toward Carrie is now different. She makes a peace offering, in the form of an uncharacteristically lame (but sympathetic) wig joke. She’s protective, almost maternal toward the younger woman who, with her similar hair color and matching black wardrobe, is almost like an unpolished version of herself — a rough draft, slivers of brilliance mixed in with a whole bunch of childish junk.

Astrid puts in a plea for Carrie’s professional help. She is, indeed, horrified (as were some readers) by the colossal degree of self-involvement that allowed Carrie to lose track of Quinn without telling anyone for nine days.

“Nine days?” Astrid repeats, in disbelief, but she quickly recovers. Kids will be kids, the set of her shoulders seems to say; some people’s pre-frontal cortex matures later in life; others, seemingly, never at all. She reviews security camera footage. She holds Carrie’s hand.

Interestingly, Nina Hoss, who plays Astrid, is only 4 years older than Claire Danes. But styled as Astrid and Carrie, the two women look and seem much farther apart in age and experience. Astrid is wise, with the emotional reserve of someone practiced in suffering; Carrie’s got the edge in tech savvy with her “algorithm,” and is clearly whip-smart, but she’s impulsive and as young beyond her years as Astrid is old beyond hers.

“Quinn never did anything he didn’t want to,” Astrid tells Carrie. “That’s the truth. He was a complete pain in the ass that way. Stubborn as a mule. Beautiful, too.” One wonders how the Quinn/Astrid story came to an end. One senses that it wasn’t Quinn who walked away.

It seems unfair, somehow, for Astrid to be absent from the final hospital scene in which Carrie sits by Quinn’s bed, accompanied by Saul who, as I recall, never much liked the cool-cat operative in the first place. But as the C.I.A. reclaims its own, is Astrid there after all — in Carrie’s more resolute stare, in her firmer control of the slight chin-jiggle that seizes her when Saul enters the room? Perhaps.

A couple of quick takes on other characters tonight.

Saul “Angry by nature. One of the angriest men I’ve ever known,” Allison says. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy. I found his spiral into physical violence weird. And pointless. Was it a studied play? A way to set up a bad cop/good cop dynamic with Dar, who has never before treated Allison so nicely? (And did you notice that the black ops chief was almost in tears after viewing the Quinn video?)

Ivan Out of the shadows, in the harsh light of a C.I.A. detention room, and looking to Allison for his every move, the wily spy has become just a skinny guy in a whole mess of trouble. I hope he gets his mojo back soon.

Laura Undeserving of anything more than Jonas’s perfectly timed words: “Nice speech.” Won’t she ever shut up? Isn’t there some world-saving nonprofit back in the United States that can offer her a job — off screen? Maybe it’s time for her to go to grad school, and take scholarly Qasim (in the student-like sweater, who saves Quinn) along. I’ll crowd-source the tuition.

Bibi and the terrorists It’s uncanny how well the most recent episodes of “Homeland” have corresponded to recent world events. The dialogue among the Americans — “We can’t give these [expletive] license to send our cities into mass panic anytime they feel like it. It’s the new normal, gentlemen” — is so on target as to be almost preternaturally prescient. And there’s an awful lot of German dialogue among the terrorists in this episode, clearly a creative choice to drive home their rootedness in Europe.

The gray-haired lady with the dog Who is she? What and how is Allison signaling to her, as she turns her back on her loyal bodyguard, and smiles her villainous little smile near the episode’s end? It has something to do with smoking, I’m sure. These days, a cigarette is never just a cigarette.

Judith Warner, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, is the author, most recently, of “We’ve Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication.”

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